Chapter 206
Chapter 206
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 206
Chapter Title: This World is Regressing
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For now, we decided to break free from the tombstone and return to reality.
Jade's graveyard felt as real as it might, but in the end, it was an illusory realm I had conjured up myself. We needed to head back to reality and make some preparations.
Of course, Kim Joo-cheol was horrified.
"Mr. Jang! You can't just abandon us like this. You have to come back. Otherwise, we'll really...!"
"I'll return within a week at the latest. Please protect my wife and child and wait for me."
"A week..."
Kim Joo-cheol trembled wildly in his anxiety. After barely calming him down and escaping the graveyard, crisp air greeted us.
The soccer stadium lay in ruins.
Yet unlike inside the graveyard, where all of Busan Seo-gu had been engulfed in flames, the real village was quiet.
"...I didn't realize it at first. Regression can push the human mind that far."
The Saintess, still holding my hand, murmured at my side.
"Kim Joo-cheol and the citizens lost their minds, but looking at it rationally, it was just 1,000 days. Not even three full years repeated. And yet..."
She glanced at me.
I knew what she wanted to say. I'd been a regressor for thousands of years and seemed relatively fine by comparison.
I shrugged.
"I repeat entire lifetimes. They just repeat a single day."
"...Is that really all there is to it?"
"Anyway, let's get moving. Even if he's been forgotten in reality, I can't just leave Kim Joo-cheol like that."
"Yeah. I agree."
We toured all over Busan.
Our goal was simple: to observe whether similar phenomena were occurring in the jade tombstones sealing people other than Kim Joo-cheol.
The result?
"Hmm."
I let out a groan.
"All of them are infected."
It wasn't just Kim Joo-cheol.
In checking just fifty tombstones, every single one of the fifty people had been struck by the '24-hour regression virus.'
That meant every one of the roughly half a million [Time Sealed] people on the Korean Peninsula was surely infected with the same anomaly.
And after spending the whole day roaming Busan, we uncovered yet another fact.
"...Mr. Undertaker. It looks like it's affecting the humans in reality too."
"Yeah."
Indeed.
As we'd seen in the tombstone, countless ordinary citizens had appeared in Kim Joo-cheol's dream.
Most of them had died or gone missing in reality while enduring the apocalypse.
But about one in ten were still surviving in Busan Seo-gu.
These survivors—the ordinary citizens who'd appeared in Kim Joo-cheol's dream—for some reason, their sleeping hours in reality were 'gradually lengthening.'
"Whew, don't get me started. With this hot weather lately, these weird thoughts keep popping into my head."
We got concrete testimony from one of the survivors. He was a soccer player who'd once been on the same team as Kim Joo-cheol.
(Of course, he was completely unaware of Kim Joo-cheol's existence or the fact that he was repeating a 24-hour loop in the dream.)
"Weird thoughts...?"
"Hmm. Hard to put into words. Like deja vu? You know, that feeling like you've been through this exact thing before? I've been getting it more and more lately."
"......"
An abnormal symptom.
If it had been just this one person, we might've brushed it off as heatstroke. But every survivor we found in Seo-gu reported the exact same symptoms.
The severity varied, but they all shared the undeniable common thread of experiencing some inexplicable deja vu.
Every one of them had been citizens rampaging madly in Kim Joo-cheol's dream, infected by the regression virus.
"...Hold on."
By the time our investigation reached this point, the Saintess's expression had darkened to an unprecedented degree.
"Mr. Undertaker. Didn't you say the number of people you've Time Sealed nationwide exceeds half a million?"
"That's right."
"...Then if all five hundred thousand of them are infected with the regression virus. And everyone appearing in those five hundred thousand dreams gets infected too, with the symptoms manifesting in reality..."
I nodded.
"Yes. It won't be long before the entire Korean Peninsula starts complaining of the same thing."
6
The Regression Alliance was convened on an emergency basis.
I jotted down a brief summary on the blackboard about the effects of the 'unknown anomaly.'
――――――――――
[Anomaly's Identity = Nut??]
1. Inside the jade tombstone, the sealed person is undergoing '24-hour regression.'
2. Memories should normally reset after 24 hours, but for some reason, they're persisting.
3. The symptom is gradually spreading to people around them.
4. The effects aren't limited to inside the jade tombstones—they're appearing in reality too. The humans affected in reality are feeling deja vu like 'something is repeating.'
――――――――――
Once the explanation was done, No Do-ha was the first to furrow her brow.
"Fuck. What the hell is this anomaly? Now diseases are spreading through dreams? And turning everyone in the world into half-assed regressors...?"
"We don't know for sure yet."
I spoke calmly.
"It's probably an overlap of multiple anomalies, but first, let me ask you all. Have you been feeling strong deja vu lately?"
The alliance members exchanged glances.
Seo-gyu spoke up first.
"Now that you mention it... This morning at breakfast, I got this feeling like, uh, I've definitely seen this exact scene before, bro."
"M-Me too."
Sim A-ryeon mumbled hesitantly.
"The guild leader commissioned that thing last time... Man-sang Yu-hee...? Anyway, he asked for a blue butterfly painting. And while I was drawing it, I thought, huh? I've definitely drawn this exact thing before..."
"I've had a similar experience as well."
Yoo Ji-won chimed in.
"I dismissed it as just my imagination, but if it's the anomaly's influence, that makes perfect sense. Your Excellency. To be frank, even the scenery in this meeting room feels strangely familiar."
As expected.
The number of people I'd subjected to [Time Seal] was a staggering half a million.
Seo-gyu, Sim A-ryeon, Yoo Ji-won—they'd all likely made brief appearances in the dreams of one or more of those half a million.
"For now, we can surmise it's an overlap of multiple concepts. Valhalla seems to be involved, for one."
"Valhalla? That Norse thing where warriors who die go to the afterlife and keep killing each other...?"
"Exactly."
Valhalla, one of the afterlives.
The souls invited to Valhalla slaughter each other every morning, only to resurrect every evening.
"There's no other afterlife with the concept of eternally repeating the exact same 'day' schedule."
"Hmm..."
"This anomaly probably has the ability to manipulate the concept of the 'afterlife.' Hell, the abyss—some place where souls that vanish from reality gather."
Tap, tap.
I wrote on the blackboard as I explained.
"The people I've funeraled through [Time Seal] completely vanish from this real world. In a sense, the interior of the jade tombstones is no different from the afterlife. At least, that's how this anomaly sees it."
"...So the anomaly contaminated your tombstones, Mr. Undertaker?"
"Correct."
More precisely, its ultimate goal is probably contaminating this Undertaker.
"...You."
"Think about it: what the people inside the jade tombstones are going through is essentially a miniature version of me. I'm a regressor, and they're regressing too, even if it's just over 24 hours. I don't love using the analogy, but..."
Tap. I added more to the blackboard.
――――――――――
[Undertaker = Outer God]
-Regression ability, Perfect Memory ability
[Kim Joo-cheol & Other Sealed = Apostles]
-Regression ability (24 hours), Memory ability
――――――――――
I turned back to face them.
"This kind of structure could end up forming."
"......!"
The Saintess's eyes widened.
"If you're in the position of an Outer God, it attacks the apostles underneath first to bring down the whole thing...?"
"Yes. Not that I'm actually an Outer God—it's just how the anomaly is treating me."
It was the strategy of shooting the horse to kill the general.
To pull that off, it needed to make me, the Outer God, and the apostles as similar as possible. So what was the biggest difference between Kim Joo-cheol and me?
"...Memory."
"Exactly. Not only am I aware that I'm regressing, but I remember it perfectly thanks to [Perfect Memory Ability]. Kim Joo-cheol, on the other hand, had no idea his 24 hours were repeating."
So it forces the similarity.
It defines Kim Joo-cheol as an 'offshoot of the Undertaker.'
Not just Kim Joo-cheol—it imposes 'Undertaker-like traits' on all five hundred thousand Time Sealed people.
Once it drops all five hundred thousand under its influence or makes them taste hell—
"It can land a blow on me."
"......"
"That's the calculation the enemy anomaly is likely making. It's still just inference, though."
Silence fell over the meeting room.
No Do-ha propped her chin crookedly, unfazed by the quiet.
"In other words, that anomaly's gunning for you...?"
"Yes. Whether it was intentional or purposeful, the result is definitely a targeted strike on me."
"Is this normal? I mean, do anomalies actually pull off elaborate tactics aimed at one specific person...?"
"--No."
The one who answered No Do-ha's question wasn't me—it was the Saintess.
"From the anomalies' perspective, Mr. Undertaker isn't a person."
"......"
"Anomalies don't distinguish between people and non-people to begin with. It's all the same phenomenon. Your five hundred thousand afterlives just looked like plump prey."
I agreed with the Saintess's view.
"Either way, an anomaly that knows how to toy with 'afterlives' and 'hells' is obviously extremely dangerous. We need to act as quickly as possible..."
"Mr. Undertaker."
The Saintess cut me off. It was so rare that I was a little startled.
Come to think of it, it was unusual for the Saintess—who usually joined meetings remotely via [Telepathy]—to show up in person at National Highway Management Corps HQ.
"What's wrong?"
"Sorry. But I had to let you know right away. Take a look at the post that went up on SG Net thirty seconds ago."
I pulled out my smartphone.
It was midday, so posts were flooding in actively, but I instinctively knew which one she meant just from the title.
-Anonymous: This world is regressing.
I clicked on the post immediately.
-Anonymous: This world is regressing.
-Sorry to get serious, but I couldn't bear the pain anymore, so I picked up my smartphone.
-Truth is, I've been feeling deja vu for a while now.
-Whether waking up in the morning or lying down at night, this vivid sense that I've seen the exact same scenes somewhere before—it was weird.
-But today, I finally realized. This isn't deja vu. I've really gone through this exact thing multiple times, and similar things tens of thousands of times.
-The Ten Tribes have been exterminated countless times. I've gone to war against the Meteor Shower dozens, hundreds of times. It's weirder that I haven't thought of it until now.
-Everyone will think I'm spouting nonsense, but I'm serious. Maybe even this realization is me being possessed by an anomaly, but the deja vu is so vivid right now.
-My head feels like it's splitting. It's agonizing. When I close my eyes, I see myself dying hundreds of times over and over.
-My head smashed, my guts sliced open, my limbs pierced, my whole body shredded to pieces.
-I want to die. No, I'm already dying. Why is this happening to me?
-I'm not crazy. The world's crazy.
"......"
I wasn't the only one who checked the post. Everyone had heard the Saintess and was peeking at SG Net.
Seo-gyu panicked.
"B-Bro! Should we... block this? Comments are piling up in real time..."
"Don't force censorship. Run the hero syndrome macro to flush it to the back pages. Clumsy intervention will probably make it worse."
"Got it. On it."
Even as I said that, everyone in the room—and I—could feel it.
This was just a stopgap.
The enemy's assault had only now truly begun.